Friday, November 6, 2009

Hasan: Murderous Therapy for an Irate Muslim

My neighbor has been after me to watch Glenn Beck on Fox and I tried to watch yesterday for the first time. I had given up television news after the 2008 election coverage, which was the worst, most incompetent partisan exercise I could have imagined, and do not believe I have missed anything by limiting my news consumption to e-mails from friends and bloggers. Most, if not all of what's in television news is diversionary drivel. The main question for America is the St. Louis Fed's money supply statistic, and that is rarely if ever mentioned on television news. It should be mentioned and analyzed for a minimum of two prime-time hours per month on every television news station. Instead, one can rely on lots of partisan and pro-Wall Street propaganda and few if any important facts.

Sadly, Beck was not on yesterday despite my honest effort to watch because of the mass murder at Fort Hood. The story is tragic and the loss of 13 lives and wounding of 30 is a matter of great sorrow.

There are a number of interesting questions about this incident, not only involving what seems to have been the Army's incompetent response to Nidal Malik Hasan's increasing militancy and vocally traitorous reluctance to go to Iraq. If you were listening to the coverage on Fox yesterday, even Hasan's cousin said that he was openly saying that he would refuse to go. This is fine for a hippy in Phoenicia, New York, not acceptable for a Major in the US Army.

Several of his colleagues in Fort Hood described ongoing statements that to my mind were aggressively disloyal, possibly going back to his problems at Walter Reed Medical Center. One of the callers to Fox News who knows Hasan said that Hasan was openly saying that he did not think he should have to fight another Muslim and that his loyalty to Islam was greater than to the United States. The way this caller was describing various statements Hasan had been publicly making at Fort Hood suggests that the Army was remiss in not investigating and removing him much, much earlier. One must wonder if political correctness played a role.

I am a Jew. But the minute I say that my allegiance to Israel takes any kind of precedence to my loyalty to the United States, I should leave the country.

There appears to be no reason to believe at this point that there was a conspiracy. Rather, Hasan had joined the military right out of high school; the military paid for his extensive education, including medical school; Hasan was a practicing psychiatrist; and about six or seven years ago Hasan publicly announced that he was a traitor to his country, preferring to insist on his cultural attachments to Islam over his oath of loyalty to the United States, even given the massive material benefits he has taken. Just on a material level, the man was amoral scum long before he killed all those people. Of course, his lack of virtue and willingness to accept material benefits from a nation to which he was disloyal all along are small vices compared to his horrific willingness to murder.

Hasan was a psychiatrist entrusted with the job of helping returning veterans cope with stress and readjustment. Yet, Hasan handled stress in a way that goes beyond incompetence. A butcher. A mass murderer. Yet, he had the training of a psychiatrist.

Might we conclude that psychiatric therapy is garbage, a bullshit discipline whose practitioners have no more claim to helping people than their exemplar, Nidal Malik Hasan? If so, might it be time for the American government to scrap all federal subsidies to this quack profession?

I do not claim that medical psychiatry is junk or that the advances made with respect to psychiatric drugs are. Rather, therapeutic psychiatry has never worked, yet due to political pressure they have cornered large public sums to subsidize their incompetent work. It is time this charade stopped.

The guy giving psychiatric advice on how to handle stress turned out to be a mass murderer. Think about it. It's your dime, people.

Second, it appears that there were no organized groups behind Hasan. Rather, he arrived at his violent response simply from his understanding of Islam. It seems to me that this evidence of an embedded impulse toward violence in the Islamic faith. I do not claim that most Muslims are violent. Just the opposite. Most are peaceful. But it is a lie to say that this pattern has not repeated itself over and over.

CAIR took a good first step in condemning this violence. A good second step is to begin to ask what are the assumptions in the Koran and the Islamic faith that have led repeatedly to this kind of bizarre behavior and how do we correct it through public utterance and religious exhortation.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.